A new 126-foot-wide video display was designed to angle with the slope of the stadium’s roof.sporting kc
Sporting Kansas City partnered with Daktronics on several upgrades to the LED displays at Children’s Mercy Park ahead of the 2024 MLS season. The club’s home opener last Saturday marked the first time fans were able to experience them.
Headlining the project is a new 126-foot-wide video display board at the south end of the 18,467-seat stadium. Designed to angle with the slope of the stadium’s roof, the board ranges from 35 feet tall at its highest point to 20 feet at its lowest, with a 5-foot-wide side board running the spine of the taller end facing the concourse. Replacing a smaller screen surrounded by traditional signage, the board will be used for everything from displaying match information to dynamic advertising, according to Sporting KC president and CEO Jake Reid.
“It allows you to be completely flexible on what you want to do,” Reid said, citing statistics to sports wagering lines. “There’s a million things you can do now that are fan engagement focused."
The club also had to find a solution for the sponsors whose logos were on the previous, traditional signage, including Compass Minerals, UMB Bank and Price Chopper.
“Clearly the partners that were on [the original signage], we had to accommodate for. I think the beauty of that is we can now take them everywhere in-venue versus selling one sign, which is a very old-school sponsorship method. We can be dynamic with how we place them, when we place them, they can do complete takeovers, versus having one small square on the board.”
Daktronics has completed the uniquely shaped display boards at two other major Kansas City sports venues, Arrowhead Stadium and Kauffman Stadium, noted regional sales manager Tony Mulder. The company also installed two 5-by-317-foot ribbon boards along the Children’s Mercy Park fascia and a 14.5-by-24-foot auxiliary board in the northeast corner. All boards feature 10-millimeter pixel spacing for wide-angle visibility.
“From a shape standpoint, it’s unique because we fit [the space that] was there. We’ve done that at a number of locations,” Mulder said of the main board. “I think it’s going to be fun. There’s some pieces of it that are going to make for some really fun content, like the side [board] and like taking the additional space that they had, instead of just having advertisers that are fixed.”
Sporting KC and Daktronics both declined to comment on the cost of the upgrades, but Mulder noted the company’s soccer-specific stadium projects typically range from $2.5 million to $5 million and the team said this project landed in that window. Daktronics has LED systems in more than half of pro sports facilities in the United States and Canada, and first worked with Sporting KC in a consulting capacity before Children’s Mercy Park opened in 2011. Over the past several years, the company has taken on a series of upgrades for the MLS club, beginning with a new pitch perimeter display in 2019.
“What they’ve delivered across the industry speaks for itself,” Reid said of Daktronics. “You couple consistency of experience along with the partnership approach and it was a pretty easy decision [to work with them].”
